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RAINSVILLE, Ala.–Emergency relief started to roll into northeast Alabama on Friday, after DeKalb County officials estimated that 32 people died and about 200 were injured from the storms this week.

At the Broadway Baptist Church here, out-of-town volunteers from the Alabama Baptist State Convention were setting up a large tent in the parking lot to serve up to 20,000 meals a day. The Baptists also brought a trailer equipped with showers.

A Salvation Army food truck was dispatched to deliver ham sandwiches and bottled water to residents whose electricity remains out.

Though local residents had been complaining about not receiving assistance, several churches housed survivors and delivered food, said Christy Hardin, deputy director of the DeKalb County Emergency Management Agency. Read More »

More than 125 people died in Alabama when a storm unleashed tornadoes and flash floods, with some of the heaviest damage reported from a university town. Mississippi reported 32 deaths, bringing the overall death toll across five states to more than 200. The latest storm videos are inside. Read More »

Commissioner John McMillan said about 200 poultry houses were destroyed and another 180 damaged. A standard poultry house can hold about 20,000 chickens.

Mr. McMillan said Thursday the loss of drinking water and power outages could worsen the situation. He said field inspectors from the state Department of Agriculture and Industries are assisting state emergency management efforts. Read More »

Federal officials headed to Alabama Thursday to lend assistance and survey the damage from devastating tornadoes that left at least 131 people dead in the state and between half a million and a million people without power, federal and state officials said.

The death toll was sure to rise, officials said, as emergency personnel continued to search the wreckage covering 16 counties, with major damage in five, including a direct hit in the city of Tuscaloosa. Two-thousand state National Guard troops assisted rescue efforts, supporting local first responders and some help from other states. Read More »

Multiple tornadoes hit Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday night, killing at least 36 people and sending roughly 100 to hospitals after leveling sections of the city. The tornadoes touched down on McFarland Boulevard, a section of 15th Street and two residential neighborhoods—the historic Highlands and the Downs—said Gerry Green, a 76-year-old widow who spent a portion of Wednesday night hiding in a storage closet in her home. One strip of stores was demolished in the city of 93,000. ”Those stores were just like they have never been there before,” said Ms. Green.

The Browns Ferry nuclear facility in northern Alabama remained safely shut down after it lost power following devastating storms in the area, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Valley Authority said Thursday. The nuclear plant, which provides 10% of the power generated by the TVA, shut down at 4:36 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Wednesday, after the storms damaged transmission lines going into the plant, said TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci.

“We are in a safe shutdown mode,” Ms. Martocci said. “We’re assessing the damage outside of the plant on the transmission system to determine what we need to fix.”